I will admit it. I am lazy. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as a developer, so I am not losing much sleep over it. When I first began doing code katas several years ago, I made it a point to get more efficient and find shortcuts within the tooling. This meant hotkeys and code snippets within Visual Studio, useful extensions, and the various shortcuts that JetBrains’ ReSharper gives you to help improve productivity. At the time, I wrote an article on ReSharper Live Templates but with the recent updates to ReSharper and Visual Studio, I wanted to revisit and give it a refresh.

Unlike many, I did not play around with the release candidate builds of Visual Studio 2017 much. I knew it was out there and had it installed, but never got around to using it much. With the official release on March 7th, I was excited to see the finished version and being using some of the new features. One that stood out to me, and has been hyped by others online, is the new Live Unit Testing feature.

In an attempt to improve my writing abilities, I’ve been reading several writing books. The one recommended to me the most was “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser. The book is great, but something struck me early on that I wanted to share.

One of the best things about Twitter is seeing what stuff the people I follow recommend or promote. Given most of us are in the same industry, it only makes sense that I take a look and see if a particular book, blog post, or screencast can be useful to me. I’ve seen several people over the past couple of weeks tweeting/re-tweeting about this “Steal Like An Artist” book by Austin Kleon. I took a quick look at it on Amazon, but wasn’t quite sure if it would be very beneficial to someone like me. However, the reviews were excellent and it was only 8 dollars (for either Kindle or Paperback edition), so I said what the hell and purchased it anyway.

It might sound surprising, but I never actually learned HTML. I remember purchasing a book on HTML back in highschool, but I never did finish it. Over the years I picked up a bit of HTML or CSS here and there, but still never really knew it. I’ve found myself doing a lot more plain HTML & CSS recently, especially due to the powerful changes in HTML5, so I figured I should read up a bit. Several people recommended the HTML & CSS book by Jon Duckett on Twitter, so I decided to give it a shot.